CHAPTER III
STUDY AND READING
Again in the nineties, when Mr. Olmsted was thinking over and analyzing his early experiences in their effect on his subsequent professional work, there is a letter to an old friend, a lady, which shows especially his turn of mind in youth and some of his self-chosen readings:
I am thinking that of all the young men you know, I was the least likely to do what I have, and that you cannot know or guess in what way I was led to it. Nor can you know what is most prominently in my mind when I refer to these doings. I need not conceal from you that I am sure that the result of what I have done is to be of much more consequence than any one else but myself supposes. As I travel, I see traces of influences spreading from it that no one else would detect, which if given any attention by others, would be attributed to “fashion.” There are, scattered through the country, seventeen large public parks, many more smaller ones, many more public or semi-public works, upon which, with sympathetic partners or pupils, I have been engaged. After we have left them, they have, in the majority of cases, been more or less barbarously treated, yet as they stand, with perhaps a single exception, they are a hundred years ahead of any spontaneous public demand, or of the demand of any notable cultivated part of the people. And they are having an educative effect perfectly manifest to me--a manifestly civilizing effect. I see much indirect and unconscious following of them. It is strange how often I am asked: “Where did you get that idea?” as if an original idea on the subject had not been expected. But I see in new works of late much evidence of effects of invention--comprehensive design; not always happy, but symptomatically pleasing. Then I know that I shall have helped to educate in a good American school a capital body of young men for my profession,--all men of liberal education and cultivated minds. I know that in the minds of a large body of men of influence I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession, an art, an art of design. I have been resolute in insisting that I am not to be dealt with as a mere agent of my clients, but as a councillor, a trustee, _on honor_. I have always refused to take employment on other terms, and when it has appeared that I must do so or yield the point, I have seven times already resigned the charge of important and interesting works. It is what I have done in these respects, and what I see of the indirect effect on the standing of my profession and the progress of my art, that leads me to write to you after so many years, in the self-complacent way that I do. This, rather than anything you have seen, or of which you have read.
I was saying that of the young men, comradic young men, that you knew, I was the last to have been expected to lead such a life as I have. I was strangely uneducated,--mis-educated. Because of an accident putting my eyes in some peril, I was at the most important age left to “run wild,” and when at school, mostly as a private pupil in families of country parsons of small, poor parishes, it seems to me that I was chiefly taught how not to study,--how not to think for myself. I tried to learn Euclid by rote, without trying to understand what it meant. While my mates were fitting for college, I was allowed to indulge my strong natural propensity for roaming afield and day dreaming under a tree. The year before John entered college, I went to sea before the mast. It was soon after my return from China that I first met you and you lifted me a good deal out of my constitutional shyness and helped more than you can think to rouse a sort of scatter-brained pride and to make me realize that my secluded life, country breeding, and mis-education were not such bars to an “intellectual life” as I was in the habit of supposing. Or, if this is too personal, let me say that, through visiting at your house the first winter I was at New Haven with John, I was given a turn, not to study, but toward an “intellectual life” to which I feel that nearly all that I have been saying complacently of my doings is to be remotely attributed. You will smile of my thinking of you at all as a mentor, especially in a literary way, if you remember a certain Christmas present that you gave me: (It was burned thirty years afterwards with some heirlooms, autograph letters of Washington and Webster and other treasures). But in some way in which you had to do, I was led up at that time to Emerson, Lowell and Ruskin, and other real prophets who have been familiar friends ever since. (Here they are on my bed-table). And these gave me the needed respect for my own constitutional tastes and an inclination to poetical refinement in the cultivation of them that afterwards determined my profession. Yet that is not quite fair, for I had had two lifts in the same direction before. One, when I had heard my father reading the books of travel in New England of President Dwight, Professor Silliman and Miss Martineau, in all of which the observations on scenery with which I was familiar had helped to make me think that the love of nature, not simply as a naturalist but as a poet loves it, was respectable. The other, when, yet a boy, I found in the Hartford Public Library certain books, which it is a strange thing that I should have looked into; stranger that I should have assimilated as much as, when re-reading them perhaps twenty years afterwards, I found that I had. They were Price on the _Picturesque_ and Gilpin on _Forest Scenery_,--books of the last century, but which I esteem so much more than any published since, as stimulating the exercise of judgment in matters of my art, that I put them into the hands of my pupils as soon as they come into our office, saying, “You are to read these seriously, as a student of law would read Blackstone.”
Of Mr. Olmsted’s early reading we have several accounts in letters written at the time.
There is a letter to Fred. Kingsbury in which Fred. Olmsted enumerates “Books to Read.”
MORAL PHILOS: “Butler’s Sermons,” (recommended by Dr. Chalmers, Sir James Mackintosh, Arnold, Pycroft and others). In place of it, “Sewell’s Chstn. Morals”; “Abercrombie’s Philos. of Moral Feeling” (brief and comprehensive); “Foster’s Essay on Decision of Character.” MENTAL PHILOS: “Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, and the Investigation of Truth”; “Combe’s Constitution.” POLITICAL PHILOS: “Miss Martineau’s Tales,” (I suppose they are to Polit. Philos. similar to Historic Novels to History); “Whately” [Richard]; “M’Culloch’s Principles”; “The Encyclopedia” (Rent, tax, etc.); “Jefferson”; “The Federalist, etc.”; ART: “Abstract of Sir Josh. Reynolds’ discourses”; “Abstract of Pilkington’s Lives of Painters”--(Visit collection in compy. with an artist); “Allan Cunningham’s British Painters”--Sculpture--Encyclopedia. BRITISH HISTORY: “Socy. for Prom. Chstn. Knowledge”; “Miller’s Life of George III”; “Lives of George IV and Wm. IV”; “History of British India”; “Basil Hall”; “Macaulay.”
I say nothing about Poetry or Fiction or Ecclesiastical Literature. I’ve read enough already to choose from to read over again without going wrong, and I presume I can read back to better advantage than I can read ahead. I say nothing either about Agriculture or Law--I have a course in each laid out. I expect to read on Geology, Mineralogy, and Anatomy before long and Nat’l History generally as I have opportunity or inclination.
I’ll thank you to give me any advice suggested to you in reading the above. I have left out “Cobbett’s Grammar,” “Whately’s Rhetoric and Logic.” I have read “Burke on Taste” and your Rept. of Prof. Lardner’s Lecture. I should like to find more of those comprehensive Lectures on such subjects. Prof. Lardner’s Lectures are brief and comprehensive and very well adapted to give a simple man a common information in regard to Natural Science and Mechanics. You must have been bored with this letter but I expect you to answer it becomingly.
It must have been earlier than this that he attended with Charles Brace “a private course of lectures on architecture.”
From 1845, Mr. Olmsted’s main study centered in agriculture. From “Fairmount,” Mr. Geddes’s farm, he wrote to his father June 16, 1846: “_Farmer’s Lib._ &c I received Monday. I am glad they are going to publish the _Book of the Farm_ next. I had hoped they would. It is a cheap way of getting it. English price is I think $20.”
Again on Aug. 12, 1846, he wrote:
I have been looking for a letter from you and the _Monthly Journal_ for two or three days. I am anxious to hear about the Head Farm. If the _Farmer’s Library_ can be had separately at half subscription price, I would drop the _Monthly Journal_ though it is very good, in favor of Drs. Emmons and Prime’s _Quarterly Journal of Agriculture and Science_, a very able, practical, scientific, periodical, $1.50.
I have thought of writing an article about Fuller’s Farming, etc. for the _Cultivator_, but have given it up because I have not myself sufficient reliance on the correctness of statements.
The same year he wrote to Fred. Kingsbury: “I am reading now everything on Horticulture and Pears and Arnold’s life and correspondence--I always loved Arnold--and pears.”
From Guilford, Connecticut, February 16, 1847, Frederick wrote his brother John: “Tell Father I want the _Horticulturist_, etc. Nothing here but the _Boston Cultivator_.”
On a visit to New York City in October, 1847, he mentioned spending a forenoon “at Colman’s,” who has “a beautiful new portfolio of sketches in Holland and Belgium, mostly interiors. They are very fine” ... “lots of fine things of course--two finer than I ever saw of Landseer” ... “I bought a number of books, cheaply at the auctions.”
After his father purchased for him the farm on Staten Island, he began to think of a rounded-out collection of his own. We find him writing to his brother: “There are a lot of books that are essential to even a common library--or a country tavern parlor--that I have not got. Such buy if you can, without fail.”
The young farmer thought also of decorating his walls, and wrote to his father about pictures (March 9, 1848): “You said I could have a lot out of the portfolios; I should be exceedingly glad if you could spare me some frames.” The “portfolios” doubtless included the one which Mr. Olmsted referred to later in life in a reminiscent jotting:
The first portfolio of prints that I ever saw was a possession of my childhood and was a series of views of English park scenery. Chance soon after put in my hand Gilpin’s _Forest Scenery_ and Gilpin’s and Marshall’s _Tours_ and criticisms of parks. I have been studying the subject ever since.
In February, 1849, Frederick mentioned in a letter to his brother John that he had been reading and discussing _Modern Painters_, for which he always continued to have a high regard. Later in the month he referred to one of the subjects in which he was then principally interested as “Landscape Beauty and the Beauty of all Nature.” His tastes were varied, for he mentioned also several other miscellaneous subjects including the “Theory of Language” and the “Theory, Economy, etc. of Love.”
On his English tour in 1850 he acquired a number of works on agriculture and gardening, of which unfortunately we have no specific record; and after his return he wrote over to one of his travelling companions Charles Brace, still abroad: “I want you to get or order in London in addition to what I asked previously: _Morton on Soils_ (up to $2.), _Hutchinson on Spring Draining_ (not over $2.), _Hewit Davis on Thin Sowing_ (a pamphlet), Prof Johnstone’s _Tables of Experiments in Agriculture_ (a pamphlet, very important).”
Mr. Olmsted’s own book _Walks and Talks_ came out in 1852. On a bill (1852) from G. P. Putnam & Co., Publishers and Importers, including several copies of _Walks and Talks_ evidently purchased for gifts, are listed also: “1 Pencil Sketches,” “1 Smith’s Parks and Pleasure Grounds,” “1 Am. Farmer,” “1 Caird’s Agriculture,” “1 Miniature Fruit Garden,” and “1 Agricultural Survey.”
It is a great pity that the library collected by Mr. Olmsted during his career as a farmer and later as a writer, and during the first years of his work as a landscape architect, was practically all burned in the winter of 1863-64 after his departure for California. Regarding this calamity, he wrote a friend:
“Since I left New York all my household goods including a library with a number of rare technical books which I got in Europe and can never replace have been destroyed by fire.”
The books were stored at the Staten Island farm in an outbuilding, thought to have been maliciously fired.
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